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Teaching

One of the Berkman Center’s top priorities is education. Faculty, fellows, and staff affiliated with the Center engage in teaching activities that address complex legal, technological, social, and business issues; examine questions of both public and private law; and integrate relevant international and domestic legal considerations from a global perspective.

These efforts reach students from Harvard Law School and various other Harvard University graduate programs (including the Harvard Graduate School of Design and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences), Harvard College, and Harvard Extension School, as well as interested members of the general public.

The Center places a premium on innovation in pedagogy, with an emphasis on interdisciplinarity, peer-learning, and mentorship. The Digital Problem Solving Initiative serves as one example of a novel teaching and learning initiative, offering participants an opportunity to enhance and cultivate competency in various digital literacies as teams engage with research, design, and policy relating to the digital world The Berkman Center also hosts Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, a first-of-its-kind law school clinical program founded in 1999. The program is designed to offer students real-world opportunities to advise clients on legal issues relating to technology, intellectual property, privacy, online speech, and the like, under the close supervision of practicing attorneys.

The Berkman Center seeks to develop and deploy technology that enhances educational opportunities for instructors and learners alike. The H2O online textbook platform, developed by Berkman Center Director Jonathan Zittrain, demonstrates the Center’s commitment to building tools that allow students and their teachers to engage with course materials.

Finally, the Berkman Center prioritizes engagement not just with Harvard students, or within the academic community more generally, but with the broader public. Efforts such as the Center’s reading group series and the online CopyrightX course taught by Berkman Center Director Terry Fisher reach a wide audience and invite a diverse range of participants to wrestle with issues at the heart of the Center’s work.

Below, this list of Berkman-affiliated courses represents a partial list of these offerings.

This course offers an intensive introduction to the field of cyberlaw. We will investigate the evolving nature of online architecture and activities, and the ways in which the legal toolbox has been, and will be, leveraged to influence them.

The Cyberlaw Clinic, based at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, engages Harvard Law School students in a wide range of real-world client counseling, licensing and transactional, litigation, advocacy and policy projects and cases, covering a broad spectrum of Internet, new technology, and intellectual property legal issues.

This course provides an in-depth exploration of Dante Alighieri's 14th-century masterpiece, the Divine Comedy, from the standpoint of the history of Western poetry, language, religious belief, geography and science. Particular attention is paid to Dante's dialogue with ancient authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Virgil and Ovid, as well as to imaginative mappings of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise.

With mythic origins in Magna Carta, a history intimately connected with struggles for liberty, cornerstone of constitutions of the states and United States of America, the American jury was once the bulwark of our liberty and the foundation of our law. Our class will engage the jury as history and practice. We will find it sick, institutionally speaking, weakened by racism wrapped in legalism, and urgently in need of competent legal representation, which we will seek to provide.

The course will provide an introduction and overview to questions of communications and Internet law and policy. The intensive semester will combine several lectures and in-class discussions to provide background and overview of major issues, with intensive, workshop-style group work on policy briefs and in-class presentations

Watson is the world Jeopardy champion. Siri responds accurately to "Should I bring an umbrella tomorrow?". How do they work? This course provides an introduction to the field of computational linguistics, the study of human language using the tools and techniques of computer science, with applications to a variety of natural-language-processing problems such as those deployed in Watson and Siri, and covers pertinent ideas from linguistics, logic programming, and statistical modeling.

The Cyberlaw Clinic, based at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, engages Harvard Law School students in a wide range of real-world client counseling, licensing and transactional, litigation, advocacy and policy projects and cases, covering a broad spectrum of Internet, new technology, and intellectual property legal issues.

Our class will engage in understanding and building a public realm in cyberspace. Dedicated to the memory of Aaron Swartz, we will consider the history of the Internet, its generative capacity for expanding our public realm, public access to open knowledge, and Internet-mediated civic engagement and political participation.

New laws and new regulatory approaches are now under consideration to assist and constrain the intelligence community and law enforcement authorities. Meanwhile, private actors have access to enormous amounts data and are unsure how to respond to government requests. This seminar will cover readings in doctrinal surveillance law and related issues.

The objectives of this course are to demonstrate the role of marketing in the company; to explore the relationship of marketing to other functions; and to show how effective marketing builds on a thorough understanding of buyer behavior to create value for customers.

The seminar is built around a sequence of fundamental questions regarding the literary disciplines, their history and epistemology. Discussions are instigated by readings in philology, stylistics, the history of ideas, semiotics, structuralism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, film theory, genetic criticism, literary sociology, cultural studies, and digital humanities.

In this highly interactive seminar, we will identify, map, analyze, and discuss latest developments in privacy law related to the Internet from a comparative perspective and put them into a broader context.

We will discuss how an intelligence community's activities can be meaningfully communicated to the public while respecting its sources and methods; how agencies might internally reconcile their various missions to protect the public and protect public values; and what a set of authorities and limitations for intelligence collection might look like if a clean slate were available on which to develop them.

This course will explore copyright law and policy. Approximately two thirds of the class time and readings will be devoted to the American copyright system; the remainder will be devoted to the major relevant multilateral treaties and to the laws pertaining to copyright and "neighboring rights" in other countries.

The Cyberlaw Clinic, based at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, engages Harvard Law School students in a wide range of real-world client counseling, licensing and transactional, litigation, advocacy and policy projects and cases, covering a broad spectrum of Internet, new technology, and intellectual property legal issues.

The Internet operates in layers, and so does much of the technology that hooks up to it: PCs, mobile phones, tablets. Nearly two decades ago those platforms were conceptually simple: a "generative" base offered by one manufacturer, on which any third party could build. (Think: Windows and the programs that run on it.) Some efforts by platform makers to tip the scales in their favor in the layer above resulted in extended controversy and regulatory efforts, such as over Windows coming bundled with Internet Explorer. Today platforms are just as vital but far more complex. We have hybrids like the iOS and Android operating systems or the Facebook and Twitter platforms, where the platform makers offer their systems as services rather than products, influencing and sometimes outright limiting connection between users and independent developers for those platforms. How should we think about these new platforms? What counts as a "level playing field," and what responsibility, if any, is there for public authorities to enforce it? What lessons, if any, do the prior tangles offer for today?

This course is designed to introduce first-year students to the architecture of the international economic law system. Its emphasis is on elements of international law that affect cross-border economic transactions and deals.

This course explores a variety of legal issues relating to the creation, exploitation, and protection of music and other content. The seminar focuses on traditional legal regimes and business models and the ways in which new technologies (particularly the evolution of digital media and the Internet) have affected legal and business strategies involved in the making and distribution of content.

In this seminar, Urs Gasser will work with a small group of students to gain a deeper understanding of the legal implications of these seismic shifts at the intersection of law, technology, and new business models. The seminar takes a phenomenological approach: Instead of dividing topics along the lines of traditional areas of law (such as, e.g., competition law, privacy, IP, etc.), we will discuss the multi-faceted legal questions in their respective context, based on studies of recent cases and developments.

Basic introduction to property and the role of law in the construction of markets and social relations; an introduction to the vocabulary and grammar of legal forms; and initial development of skills in institutional design and critical examination of the effects of different legal arrangements on the social and economic relations they regulate.

The Cyberlaw Clinic, based at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, engages Harvard Law School students in a wide range of real-world client counseling, licensing and transactional, litigation, advocacy and policy projects and cases, covering a broad spectrum of Internet, new technology, and intellectual property legal issues.

Our class will engage the jury as history and practice. We will find it sick, institutionally speaking, weakened by racism wrapped in legalism, and urgently in need of competent legal representation, which we will seek to provide.

The Cyberlaw Clinic, based at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, engages Harvard Law School students in a wide range of real-world client counseling, licensing and transactional, litigation, advocacy and policy projects and cases, covering a broad spectrum of Internet, new technology, and intellectual property legal issues.

This course is intended for students who are already familiar with the main contours of intellectual-property law and would like to explore the subject further. We will examine in depth a series of topics that, in recent years, have proven especially controversial or troublesome: traditional knowledge; the right of publicity; intellectual-property protection for fashion; fair use; possible solutions to the crisis in the entertainment industry; patent pools and standard-setting organizations; reverse-payment settlement agreements; the relationship between copyright and freedom of speech; how legal reform might help address the health crisis in the developing world; exhaustion; extralegal IP norms; IP litigation; and the relationship between IP and business strategy.

Our class will engage in understanding and building a public realm in cyberspace. Dedicated to the memory of Aaron Swartz, we will consider the history of the Internet, its generative capacity for expanding our public realm, public access to open knowledge, and Internet-mediated civic engagement and political participation.